At The Rumpus, Richard Greenwald writes about the novels of Jonathan Lethem, urban gentrification, and the Sisyphean feat of achieving authenticity in New York.
Jonathan Lethem’s New York
Virtual Fictitious Reality
“In his column, Manjoo goes on to call out virtual reality for being ‘a lonely, anti-social affair’—but, hey, isn’t that what reading a novel used to be? I mean, before we figured out how to make books ping and arouse competitive instincts by flagging favorite passages of readers who got there before we did. (I don’t mean to harp on Farhad Manjoo or to denigrate his excellent work; his reticence is shared by others in both legacy and new media cautioning against VR.)” It looks like VR is in desperate need of good storytellers.
Give Rock and Roll Another Name
Chuck Klosterman wonders, which rock stars will historians of the future remember?
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Good Fortune is Good Fortune
Our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire is almost here. While we wait, read Boris Kachka’s profile of Hallberg for Vulture, about the expectation surrounding his highly anticipated 944-page debut novel and the experience of writing a book that is “unpublishably long.” We’ll be publishing our own illuminating interview with Hallberg on Monday.
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Welcome to the Party, VQR!
Thanks to Jane Friedman, the Virginia Quarterly Review is really blossoming of late when it comes to social media and increased web presence. Case in point: these once-a-week poem posters on their Facebook page. Extra case in point: the sort-of-not-so-secret Tumblr they’re working on!
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The Most Evil Children
From the Telegraph, and only four months early for Halloween, comes a list of the most evil children in literature, from Graham Green‘s Pinkie Brown to John Steinbeck‘s Cathy Ames.
“Happy memories pass in slow procession over the soul”
Eldritch Press, which has a whole slew of free books available online, has just added the Constance Garnett translation of Ivan Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Sketches. Happy reading, everybody.
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Profanity in Book Titles
Out this week is Marcy Roznick’s If You Give a Kid a Cookie, Will He Shut the —- Up?, a parody aimed at adults of the 1985 children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie… What’s up with all the profanity in book titles lately?
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